Lincoln Academy has strong community ties with many organizations, and there is one collaborative effort underway that is designed to support students as they transition between their middle and high school years. “KW Leads,” a program combining Kieve-Wavus Education and our students, is a six-year expeditionary program model which works with students from seventh to 12th grade. This program includes opportunities in expeditionary learning, peer-to-peer mentoring, and high schoolers supporting middle schoolers. While KW Leads does not begin until later this school year, we have been designing programs for nearly two years in preparation for the process. As we prepare for this new program, we are already benefiting from our collaboration in some exciting ways.
How are Lincoln Academy and Kieve-Wavus working together? Last year, Lincoln Academy and Kieve-Wavus Education began a relationship through an employee-share initiative known as the Educator In Residence Program. We were very fortunate to have had two educators in residence on site through the winter months to support and invest time into our kids. Much of our initial efforts focused on supplementing the advisor-advisee curriculum for our freshmen. Interactive and energetic activities that targeted social emotional learning while building positive relationships with mentoring adults outside of the school are some of the major highlights. The educators in residence also spent time mentoring in two of Lincoln’s specialty self-contained programs, adding a valuable extra adult to support initiatives and projects. We also sponsored a Sophomore Leadership Program where LA students participated in retreat-style weekends on the Kieve campus and experienced a variety of guest presentations, leadership challenges, and team-building activities. This amazing collaboration continues this school year with these programs and more.
As the relationship between Kieve-Wavus Education and Lincoln Academy grows, the benefits to our students and the broader community grow as well. I regularly find myself thinking about opportunities for Lincoln students that extend into the Kieve-Wavus campuses of Nobleboro and Jefferson. This is something that just a few years ago would not have been possible without this strong working relationship. This will continue to grow and expand as KW Leads gets off the ground with seventh- and eighth-graders from AOS 93 making their way through the programming, eventually finding themselves in intentionally designed, supportive high school programs intended to expand self-awareness, raise aspirations, and give back to the local community.
Lincoln Academy strives to instill the values of being community-focused, building students of strong character, and offering as much support as needed for all of our students to find their own successes. I feel strongly that we do an excellent job with this work and with the added benefit of collaboration with community partners such as Kieve-Wavus, we open many more doors to great potential and endless opportunities. If you have questions or ideas to support Lincoln Academy students, I invite you to stop in to see me or give me a call at 563-3596 ext. 231.
(Jake Abbott is Lincoln Academy’s dean of students. In order to highlight this Kieve-Wavus/LA collaboration, he wrote this week’s “takeover edition” of #wearelincolnacademy in place of the regular columnist, Lincoln Academy Head of School David Sturdevant.)
